Ninguna pieza entiende la Máquina

 Unos párrafos finales del libro de Daniel Dennett 'From Bacteria to Bach and Back", meditando sobre la comprensión limitada que tenemos de la realidad que nos rodea... Venimos a ser los humanos como termitas construyendo el Termitero sin que nadie lo diseñe ni lo entienda, a pesar de nuestras ilusiones de comprensión parcial o global.

We have now looked at a few of the innovations that have led us to relinquish the mastery of creation that has long been a hallmark of understanding in our species. More are waiting in the wings. We have been motivated for several millennia by the idea expressed in Feynman's dictum, 'What I cannot create, I do not understand.' But recently our ingenuity has created a slippery slope: we find ourselves indirectly making things that we only partially understand, and they in turn may create things we don't understand at all. Since some of these things have wonderful powers, we may begin to doubt the value—or at least the preeminent value—of understanding."Comprehension is so passé, so vieux-jeu, so old-fashioned! Who needs understanding when we can all be the beneficiaries of artifacts that save us that arduous effort?"

Is there a good reply to this? We need something more than tradition if we want to defend the idea that comprehension is intrinsically good—a good in itself, independently of all the benefits it indirectly provides—or practically necessary if we are to continue living the kinds of lives that matter to us. Philosophers, like me, can be expected to recoil in dismay from such a future. As Socrates famously said, "the unexamined life is not worth living," and ever since Socrates we have taken it as self-evident that achieving an ever greater understanding of everything is our highest professional goal, if not our highest goal absolutely. But as another philosopher, the late Kurt Baier, once added, "the over-examined life is nothing to write home about either." Most people are content to be the beneficiaries of technology and medicine, scientific fact-finding and artistic creation without much of a clue about how all this "magic" has been created. Would it be so terrible to embrace the over-civilized life and trust our artifacts to be good stewards of our well-being?

I myself have been unable to concoct a persuasive argument for the alluring conclusion that comprehension is "intrinsically" valuable—though I find comprehension to be one of life's greatest thrills—but I think a good case can be made for preserving and enhancing human comprehension and for protecting it from the artifactual varieties of comprehension now under development in deep learning, for deeply practical reasons. Artifacts can break, and if few people understand them well enough either to repair them or substitute other ways of accomplishing their tasks, we could find ourselves and all we hold dear in dire straits. Many have noted that for some of our hight-tech artifacts, the supply of repair persons is dwindling or nonexistent. A new combination color printer and scanner costs less than repairing your broken one. Discard it and start fresh. Operating systems for personal computers follow a similar version of the same policy: when your software breaks or gets corrupted, don't bother trying to diagnose and fix the error, unmutating the mutation that has crept in somehow; reboot, and fresh new versions of your favorite programs will be pulled up from safe storage in memory to replace the copies that have become defective. But how far can this process go?

Consider a typical case of uncomprehending reliance on technology. A smoothly running automobile is one of life's delights; it enables you to get where you need to get, on time, with great reliability, and for the most part, you get there in style, with music playing, air conditioning keeping you comfortable, and GPS guiding your path. We tend to take cars for granted in the developed world, treating them as one of life's constants, a resource that is always available. We plan our life's projects wit hthe assumption that of course a car will be part of our environment. But when your car breaks down, your life is seriously disrupted. Unless you are a serious car buff with technical training you must acknowledge your dependence on a web of tow-truck operators, mechanics, car dealers, and more. At some point, you decide to trade in your increasingly unreliable car and start afresh with a brand new model. Life goes on, with hardly a ripple. 

But what about the huge system that makes this all possible: the highways, the oil refineries, the automakers, the insurance companies, the banks, the stock market, the government? Our civilization has been running smoothly—with some serious disruptions—for thousands of years, growing in complexity and power. Could it break down? Yes, it could, and to whom couled we then turn to help us get back on the road? You can't buy a new civilization if yours collapses, so we had better keep the civilization we have running in good repair. Who, though, are the reliable mechanics? The politicans, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors—the leaders of our society, in short, are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends. According to the economist and evolutionary thinker Paul Seabright (2010), the optimistic tunnel vision with which they operate is not a deplorable and correctable flaw in the system but an enabling condition. The distribution of partial comprehension is not optional. The edifices of social construction that shape our lives in so many regards depend on our myopic confidence that their structure is sound and needs no attention from us.

At one point Seabright compares our civilization with a termite castle. Both are artifacts, marvels of ingenious design piled on ingenious design, towering over the supporting terrain, the work of vastly many individuals acting in concert. Both are thus by-products of the evolutionary processes that created and shaped those individuals, and in both cases, the design innovations that account for the remarkable resilience and effciency observable were not the brain-children of individuals, but happy outcomes of the largely unwitting, myopic endeavors of those individuals, over many generations. But there are pfofound differences as well. Human cooperation is a delicate and remarkable phenomenon, quite unlike the almost mindless cooperation of termites, and indeed quite unprecedented in the natural world, a unique feature with a unique ancestry in evolution. It depends, as we have seen, on our ability to gengage each other within the "space of reasons", as Wilfrid Sellars put it. Cooperation depends, Seabright argues, on trust, a sort of almost invisible social glue that makes possible both great and terrible projects, and this trust is not, in fact, a "natural instinct" hard-wired by evolution into our brains. It is much too recent for that. Trust is a by-product of social conditions that are at once its enabling condition and its most important product. We have bootstrapped ourselves into the heady altitudes of modern civilization, and our  natural emotions and other instinctual responses do not always serve our new circumstances.

 

Civilization is a work in progress, and we abandon our attempt to understand it at our peril. Think of the termite castle. We human observers can appreciate its excellence and its complexity in ways that are quite beyond the nervous systems of its inhabitants. We can also aspire to achieving a similarly Olympian perspectiv on our own artifactual world, a feat only human beings could imagine. If we don't succeed, we risk dismantling our precious cretions in spite of our best intentions. Evolution in two realms, genetic and cultural, has created in us the capacity to know ourselves. But in spite of several millennia of ever-expanding intelligent design, we still are just staying afloat in a flood of puzzles and problems, many of them created by our own efforts at comprehension, and htere are dangers that could cut short our quest before we—or our descendants—can satisfy our ravenous curiosity.

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Hoy, hay un nuevo reto. La Inteligencia Artificial nos hace deslocalizar todavía más funciones cognitivas, pero no es radicalmente distinta de la Inteligencia Colectiva, y puede ayudar a mantener nuestra limitada comprensión del Todo que hemos hecho y que nos ha hecho.... a la vez que puede volver todo mucho más complejo todavía de lo que jamás hubiéramos imaginado.